Is France’s unloved AZERTY keyboard heading for the scrapheap? – BBC News
France’s 100 year-old AZERTY keyboard is to be re-configured after the government ruled that it encouraged bad writing.
Source: www.bbc.com/news/blogs-eu-35365604
Keyboards need a way to layout their keys. They act as the interface between the user and the computer. But how do we work out what order to put the keys in? Well, the qwerty layout comes from the fact that letters in a typewriter that were used frequently would jam if their typewriter heads were close to each other. So the QWERTY layout was chosen since it spread out commonly used keys.
Different languages use different layouts. German has QWERTZ and French has AZERTY. These layouts developed over time to meet the different demands of the languages which used them. But now they are being reconfigured because some think that the current layout encourages bad writing.